I recently found out (eventually) what happened to a great-aunt, and made super-sure via email that this was my aunt before embracing the details. Turns out that my tenacity with Mary was just a warm-up for trying to track down her brother, Nun. (For what it's worth, Nun is a real personal name, it's just archaic.)
This is a page from the family Bible, listing Nun's birth date. He appears in a few censuses and in the 1910 US Federal Census, but disappears after that. (One genealogist of my Davises on Ancestry dot com had him dying in Illinois, and I resisted that very strongly and saw no documents to prove it.)
This is a page from the family Bible, listing Nun's birth date. He appears in a few censuses and in the 1910 US Federal Census, but disappears after that. (One genealogist of my Davises on Ancestry dot com had him dying in Illinois, and I resisted that very strongly and saw no documents to prove it.)
The censuses are the first resource to find people in history, and Nun had lived with his parents and then with his sister up to at least age 45, telling me that there was something different about him.
In fact, I did find out what happened to hide Nun from the census. The reason he seemed to have disappeared from the census is that he was listed under Newton H. Davis at a hospital for the insane. Why is he suddenly Newton and not Nun? I don't really know. I was able to get papers from that institution, and they also refer to him as William. What the unholy crap was going on? I can see getting William from Nun, but I do wonder where "Newton" came from.
Speaking of unholy, for quite a number of months, while I didn't know what became of him, I did jokingly refer to him as "the undead," with jokes about zombies at every possible juncture. You can get too serious about this stuff.
Another hint on Nun's outcome, if you want to call it that, is that he shows up on a diagram of the cemetery where his parents, brother, Gomer, and sister, Janie, are all buried. He is not listed as being interred there, but is that just a clerical error? I'm trying to find out. I hope it's written *somewhere* that he's there with them.
His death certificate (as Newton) says he's buried at Humphrey, but not which cemetery. So far I have not found him at any of the four Humphrey cemeteries. And at a stretch, the cemetery where his family is might be considered rural Humphrey, but I don't know. I have letters out, asking for information. I could "find" him yet.
And why has it become important to find him? No one is descended from him. But for some reason it mattered to me, especially when the one researcher had him so far away from home. It bugged me. At least now I know he's buried closer to home.
